1 Year Completed in Thailand – 28 Fights, Just Starting

Anniversary – 1 Year

April 6th was the one year anniversary of our arrival in Thailand. It feels quite monumental, which is perhaps both strange and ordinary since I don’t really pay a great deal of attention to anniversaries (ordinary) but this one feels like it marks the accomplishment of both goals and dreams that seemed at a time unattainable (strange). What is most peculiar about the feelings I have surrounding this anniversary is how fast it seemed – it’s like the calendar is lying to me that it’s been a whole year and yet when I look at how much has been packed into that time, I’m also impressed.

I trained in the afternoon on the first day we arrived in Chiang Mai, after a few hours sleep in a hotel in Bangkok between flights. That’s how eager I was to start this whole process of a Muay Thai life. It was very hot, incredibly bright, and the faces at the gym had hardly changed. Other than one trainer from before missing and one trainer who I didn’t know having been added, it was almost as if no time had passed between our last (and first) visit to Chiang Mai three years before, and this one. The young boys, however, had all grown into young men – their faces cutting angles that only a few years before were very soft and mass added to their bodies like packing clay onto a frame and then smoothing it over. I was greeted with warmth and recognition by those at the gym who had been there before, including other westerners who’d first found Lanna at the same time we did, AND including the dogs who, perhaps more than anybody, had aged.

I’d contacted Den through Facebook prior to our move. I’d let him know that I’d had 12 fights in all over the years that I’d been absent from Thailand and that I wanted to fight “a lot,” and that ultimately I’d like to have 50 fights. He had written things like “OK” without any reference to which part of my excitement he was confirming. For the first few months of training and fighting I was asking for more fights immediately upon getting out of the ring at the stadium and reminding him for days afterward. He knew I wanted to fight a lot but I don’t think Den trusted that I knew what I was asking for or my ability to keep up the pace. A few months after that Daeng started telling me I was fighting a lot and the trainers would talk amongst themselves (although openly in front of me) about my two fights per month with praise in their tones. Then it moved to three and sometimes four in a month. And then Den stopped needing me to ask for fights – I’d arrive at the gym and see the next date next to my name, sometimes two dates – and then he started using my frequency of fights to make fun of fit, able western men who didn’t want to fight “yet” and the Thai boys who rarely trained two days in a row.

But even with the frequency of my fights and the earnest intentions I brought to training I had not yet established my place in the gym. My primary trainer after the first fight and for many months after was Taywin, who is a good source for technique and I even started learning some Boran from him on Sundays until he very uncomfortably started insisting that I wait until “after my fight” to train Boran. This was problematic because after my fight is always before my next fight, so there’s never a space of not gearing up for a fight when I could learn. I knew it was because other trainers were, perhaps tacitly and perhaps vocally, judgmental of devoting energy toward training that is deemed abstractly as being irrelevant to ring fighting. I don’t see it that way – I think Boran can absolutely be taken into the ring – but the training fizzled nonetheless.

Developments in Training

Then Taywin left for the Philippines for a month to train the national team there. This is his pattern: he’s always reaching out to train short-term abroad, always planning for the next trip. In his absence I was trained by Daeng and Den and the holes in my training with Taywin were painfully evident. He’s the laziest trainer and I’m the hardest worker in the gym, so we were a terrible match. Prior to his return to the camp I let Den know that I did not want to return to being trained exclusively by Taywin and that I wanted Daeng and Den to keep training me when he got back. It is difficult to read the subtle gym politics of who is training whom, but this felt like this was an important thing to say. There was an uncomfortable change upon his return and his attitude toward training in general, coupled with a very nasty way of putting me down for no reason other than power dynamic and ego changed my “not exclusively by Taywin” stipulation to not at all by Taywin. And that was our falling out. It wasn’t a smooth transition, but gradually Den became my primary trainer and it was the best change for me. My training became more intense with Den pressuring me and pushing me, forcing me to fight out of corners during padwork and establish dominance even when shots were being called. About 4 months ago I started supplementing my full time training with hour 1 on 1 sessions with Neung, focused only on boxing, several times a week. It has really helped with defense, balance and rhythm.

a moment between punches, sparring with Neung

I was still asking for clinch training and sparring all the time, although my requests were always met by affirmation that we would “clinch tomorrow” and then it wouldn’t happen (or it would, once, and then not again for weeks) or the argument that because I was fighting so much I “really didn’t need to spar.” It was terribly frustrating. Every time I got in the ring and failed to do a few things that my corner was asking for I would reiterate that I needed to spar in order to practice these things under pressure and every time the response was one of non-understanding. A year in I’m still not sparring or clinching as much as I need to. Learning how to ask in a way that is no longer requesting is my work in progress.

When having an entire year to dedicate to improvement and fighting as much as possible makes it seem, on the outside or abstractly, like there’s plenty of time to work things out. When I was living in New York and training with Master K and then eventually with Kaensak as well I had to drive for an hour one way in order to get one or two hours of training. I did this as often as was possible, usually several times per week, but the commute was exhausting and eventually gas prices and work made the frequency with which I could have training sessions less and less. Growth or change in this kind of training is slow, spotty and ultimately easily traceable because it’s one small thing at a time. You’re overturning on your right kick and then you’re not anymore. The change from training maybe 8 hours per week to 7 hours per day means that the changes are no longer as noticeable. The day-to-day training may not necessarily be all that different from the kind of training you can get elsewhere in the world – it is far different from the kind of training I was getting, since padwork and sparring were not part of my regular training – but the collective day-by-day repetition and hours is unlike anything else. It’s like taking riding lessons versus working on a ranch where you’re actually just on the damn horse for hours and hours at a time. It’s hard to note the changes because they happen gradually and at the same time that other things are falling apart – you stop over-rotating on the kick at the same time that your left hook starts to become your focus, so you might miss the correction at the expense of noting the error.

How Time Moves Here

In short, impatience is not mitigated by having a lot of time. And time here progresses at a really strange pace – it goes by both quickly and slowly. If I don’t fight every week, even 10 or 14 days between fights can feel irrationally long, as if I’m developing “ring rust” even at such a short interval. And yet, travelers will come to the gym for relatively long periods of time like 3 or 6 months and that time will go by like it’s nothing. Sometimes I’ll rematch an opponent from half a year ago and it seems like I just fought her last month. I reckon this is partly due to the regimented schedule I keep, which is basically training, sleeping, eating and maybe an outing here or there. Something I did in training in the morning might feel like a few days ago by afternoon because of the deep nap I took in the middle of the day. And because of this I can think that I’ve been working on something for weeks when it has been, in actual fact only a few days.

This time protraction is at it’s worst when I have some injury because it will feel like it’s taking forever to heal. In the real world you take a week to heal an injury and it sucks because you’d rather be training but it’s “only a week.” In my world that week or even a few days seems unbearably long and that’s without even taking time off. I train around injuries and have only taken a few days actually off from training this last time I got stitches in order to try to hasten the healing time – Den had insisted I not sweat which is pretty much impossible in this heat – and also to take a short break after reaching a milestone of 40 fights and it felt terribly long, like I’d taken a month off.

This kind of non-stop training and hours put in at the gym also caused me to realize quite recently that I’ve spent more time with the trainers and Thai boys at the gym than nearly any other people in my life besides my family and perhaps my college roommates, whom I lived with for all four years. That’s pretty incredible, that I’ve spent more time in one year with Den, Nook, Neung and Daeng than I have with the coworkers at my job for over four years. It makes the notion of not seeing them every day very sad, indeed, if that should come to pass.

The 28 Fights – Fighting in Numbers

In the past year I’ve fought 28 times, bringing my total number of Muay Thai fights to 40. My trainers have shared in my madness, hesitantly at first but now they’re all on board and know what I’m doing, that I’m serious when I say “I want to fight a lot.” I don’t know of other farang fighters who have done this same thing, male or female, but I do know that I want to repeat it again this coming year – 30 would be even better than 28 – and that once anything is done it can be done again by me or anyone else. The women I fight out here fight a lot as well. I’ve seen the same woman I just fought on a fight card the next week when we’re both fighting different people, as well as fighting twice in just a few days or even on the same day. Although they don’t do this consistently, it is something that fighters in Thailand experience as just being part of fighting, part of the culture of fighting. It’s a job, it’s livelihood and a way of life – and that’s one of the most beautiful things to me about fighting in Thailand. It reminds my husband of “club boxing” in the 50’s in America when boxers would fight pretty much constantly. Something Mike Tyson did in his early career, which we call “Tyson in the Catskills” and absolutely made him the kind of fighter he was in his youth.

To Know Where You’re Going, Look Where You’ve Been

The thought of getting a year in Thailand was so unbelievable for a long time that it’s still a little hard to swallow the fact of it. My husband and I worked hard to get here and I shy away from using the word “sacrifice” for the things we gave up in order to make it happen because the primacy of getting to Thailand was so far above whatever it was we needed to omit from our lives in order to get here. Maybe a better way to say it is that we simplified our lives greatly in order to be here – it’s very simple how much I miss Master K and also how much I honestly feel that the best way to honor what he’s taught me and what he means to me is to be here, doing this. By being here.

Now that we have a second year in front of us, there’s almost no blueprint for how it feels even though we’ve just done it. A second year doesn’t feel like the first year. It’s a continuation of it, to be sure, but we knew from the onset that one year would make me a good fighter, but two years were needed to become a really good, or even great fighter. Now that the second year is a reality, all the work of the first takes on a new meaning as I look forward to the hard work and determination that will be carried over and ultimately transformed by the second. I always tell people who are looking to fight in Thailand that they should aim for two fights. This is because the first will never feel like enough, whether it’s because you did great and want more or didn’t do what you wanted to do and want a second chance – the second fight changes the meaning of the first simply by existing. And a second year of fighting every 10 days, training every day and working toward becoming a better fighter is exactly the same thing. Doing anything once is an accomplishment and shouldn’t be underappreciated. But wanting to be a great fighter, which I do, is not a matter of one versus two years. Aristotle said that “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” A second year of habitually training and fighting will unquestionably make me a better, perhaps even a great, fighter. But it won’t end there because it’s not a result, not an endgame of accomplishment. With one year behind me I want to stand on top of it, not at the end of it, and look toward the endless possibilities in front of me that merely begin with the start of a second year, and every year beyond it.

Special thanks to everyone who has supported me and made this possible: my family (especially my parents for loving my dog Zoa while I’m gone), Master K who is my inspiration and teacher, Kaensak who helped lift my focus, Andy Thomson and Pom, the trainers and fighters of Lanna Muay Thai – Kiat Busaba – Daeng, Neung, Nook, JR and Boy, Big, Off, and special thanks to Den who really has made it a point to make me the best fighter he can. And thank you to the kind neighborhood folds of Chang Kian (who feed me and cheer me when I run and ask me about my fights) and Pook at the Mong Pearl who makes me breakfast every day; and to all the supporters of this website 8limb.us, through Kickstarter and beyond, so that I have somewhere to put all these experiences.

You can support this content: Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu on Patreon

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A 103 lb. (46 kg) female Muay Thai fighter. Originally I trained under Kumron Vaitayanon (Master K) and Kaensak sor. Ploenjit in New Jersey. I then moved to Thailand to train and fight full time in April of 2012, devoting myself to fighting 100 Thai fights, as well as blogging full time. Having surpassed 100 fights in 3 years here, my new goal is to fight an impossible 200 times in Thailand, as much as I possibly can, and to continue to write my experience.

3 Comments

Lindsey Newhall

April 12, 2013 7:59 pm

Awesome, Sylvie. This is very inspirational for me. I admire your determination and focus. I’m here at a gym in Bangkok finishing up my second month, hoping to stay perhaps a year, and hoping motivation stays up. I will be returning to this post for inspiration in the future! Thanks for all you do in sharing your journey with us.

Thanks, Lindsey. Motivation is easier when the love of something is the core of it – allowing “good” or “bad” days to dictate motivation tends to lead me toward struggle. Please keep in touch regarding your experiences training in Bangkok!

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Below is meant to be a helpful guide, something that I wish I had when I first came to training Thailand. These are just things I’ve noticed in my 4 years of training and fighting here and are not hard and fast rules to follow. If you want to be polite in Thailand gyms, in a culture that is different than your own, these are just a few things to look for. There are of course a wide variety of gym experiences in Thailand, and things that are impolite in a small, family Thai-style gym might very well be common

A lot of us feel that aggression comes with an “on/off” switch, and that we should be able to flick it back and forth based on context. Many of us who are learning Muay Thai struggle with aggression, perhaps because we don’t feel that we are “naturally aggressive,” and it’s frustrating to watch those who are seemingly naturally gifted with aggression succeed in ways that we don’t see in ourselves. But aggression isn’t natural, even if it does seem innate in some more than others. I contend that aggression feels natural to some due to having spent years cultivating it before they

First a Little Bit About Daeng Daeng is one of the most fight-focused trainers I’ve trained with. When I was training at Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai, it was Daeng who invested the most in diagnosing and fixing weaknesses in my fighting. He wasn’t my main trainer, but he’s a very good teacher and has a keen eye for finding how to improve on existing strengths and correct errors. I’d initially gotten a bit stuck with a technically brilliant but lazy and unmotivated trainer – that guy was a great trainer for some, just not for me – and Daeng

Join and Study my Muay Thai Library of Legends This is a full video of a private I took with Arjan Surat, Head Coach of the Thai National Team, and owner of the esteemed (but lesser known to the west) Dejrat Gym in Bangkok. I did a short review of the gym when I interviewed female fighter Kaitlin Young, and it was then that I met Arjan Surat for the first time: an absolutely extraordinary teacher and life-force of Muay Thai. The man is Old School-Old School, telling me that he’s been holding pads longer than I’ve been alive (he’s

The Gendered Experience

Email subscribers, see the interview here Almost two years ago I interviewed Angie in anticipation of her first Muay Thai fight, after only a few months of training in Muay Thai. Remarkably, two weeks from now Angie will be having her debut fight at the legendary Lumpinee Stadium in Bangkok. A historic fight. She will be the first kathoey (Trans) fighter to enter those ropes. The famed Nong Toom “Beautiful Boxer” fought at Lumpinee and was a kathoey, but she didn’t fully fight as a “kathoey fighter”. She fought to afford sexual reassignment surgery, would fight wearing lipstick in the ring, but fought

I was having a conversation with an accomplished and very thoughtful female fighter, Mae-Lin Loew of the incredibly well written Loew Factor blog. She was at once applauding me for being so honest and open in my writing, and at the same time kind of wishing she could move more in that direction herself. The subject of social limitations to what might be perceived as self-aggrandizement in blogging came up, and this little portion of my response seemed to stand on its own and say important things, so I duplicate it here: …There’s a lot of sniping and criticism no

Form and Function and Sex: The Killer Butt Women’s bodies occupy a strange cross-section of form and function in the world of athletics. This is not to say that male bodies do not hold complex positions as well, but for many reasons the female form – due to its “natural” softness appealing to femininity and musculature of athleticism “naturally” signaling masculinity, leaving a razor-thin line between an athletic female body and a masculine female body – gets caught in the turbulent waters of looking good while performing well. Anyone who has followed my blog for a while (or who knows

The Lobloo Aero Slim Female Groin Guard inexpensive very well designed – light weight, simple, effective, comfortable could improve technique – groin confidence in clinch, kicks, knees free shipping, arrives fast I love the Lobloo female groin guard. For the most part, I think women don’t even wear groin protection because there are so few options for us – my friend Emma Thomas wrote about these nightmares here – btw, she’s getting one now too – and of those available very few are functional and/or comfortable…but the Lobloo is both. While I obviously like that this groin guard protects me

the above photo is of my mother and me laying on a mat for hours in the middle of Isaan, under the stars, waiting for my fight to come up on the card For two weeks at the end of October and beginning of November, my parents came out to Thailand for their second visit since I moved here. The first visit was up in Chiang Mai last year and now they came to Pattaya, where we’ve lived since June of this year. My parents loved Chiang Mai. They had mixed feelings about Pattaya. Part of the timing of this

I wrote this post a few years ago, probably in the first year that I was training and fighting out of Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai. At the time there were a lot of cultural differences from the west, that are perhaps more emphasized in the conservative North, that were eye-opening to me. The superstition and downright fear of women’s undergarments was a big one, which is illustrated by this story I’ve called “the panty incident.” Enjoy. A few days ago I noticed a rogue sport-top bra (style, not really supportive) hanging on a drying rack at the gym.

I was very excited and shocked to learn that my Muay Thai hero, the 12-year-old phenomenon Phetjeejaa O. Meekhun, trains at her family gym just a 30 second walk through a chicken farm from where I’ve been training every day for the last month here in Pattaya. I got to visit their gym and meet PJJ and her family a few days ago and got to actually go and train with the kids this past Monday. While en route on the big highway that runs through Pattaya and connects my two gyms, I was weaving between cars to sneak up

My interview with Angie this morning: Angie has been training consistently and with dedication at Petchrungruang Gym in Pattaya for about a year and a half now. When she first appeared at the gym we didn’t speak at all; she was only there in the afternoons and came with a friend, who wasn’t really into Muay Thai, so the pair of them kind of peripheral to my awareness. But over time Angie became more serious – she wanted to fight – and her training became more sincere as her friends drifted out of the gym. That’s when Angie and I

Surfing the Chaos I’ve known Emma for a few years now. We actually met through online communication and I forget that we didn’t actually meet each other in person until a little over a year ago. I really like Emma and recently I was scrolling through a feed of our private messages on Facebook in order to show something she’d sent me to my Thai friend and my friend remarked, “wow, you write so much! It’s like a book!” Yeah, we talk a lot. Which made me realize with surprise that I’ve not yet interviewed Emma. I’ve certainly thought to

Ladies, Send in Your Bloodied Face Fighter Photos This is a call for female fighters to send me photos of their own bloodied face, to join a wall of women who have had their faces bloodied in fights. This is really in answer to the absence of the bloodied female face in fight media, something which actively works to segregate women, aesthetically, as something less than “real” fighters. The bloodied male face is celebrated in media; it symbolizes male toughness, aggression, commitment. But to a large degree the female fighter face has been whitewashed in a sea of beauty shots

This post is taken from a response I posted on the Women Only section of the Roundtable Forum – where confirmed female members discuss all things Muay Thai. If you are a female who trains in Muay Thai do join our group. The question was raised there by one of our members about the benefits and/or complications of female only classes. Her question specifically referenced “self defense” classes and women wanting to be prepared physically and mentally for an assault, and being disappointed that they were treated “ladylike” in those courses; but there are gyms that offer “women’s classes” that

I received this communication some time ago and I was moved by the excitement and passion this woman gets from and puts into her Muay Thai. I asked her to write a bit more about how Muay Thai has affected her life and this is her beautiful response. (This writer has asked to remain anonymous and I think she speaks from a place a lot of us can appreciate): Dear Sylvie, I just wanted to mention I went to the TBA Nationals last year and took second in my division. I came down from 211 lbs to fight at 165

Either Side of the Ropes Something happens when a woman steps into the ring. It’s not universal and I cannot speak for everybody, but I’ve both witnessed this phenomenon on many occasions in other women and I’ve experienced it myself. Women who are fantastic in training – padwork, bagwork, shadowboxing all with really sharp technique – seem to fall apart in sparring or in fights. I’ve seen men do the exact opposite, looking pretty sloppy and borderline bad in training and then suddenly get it together when within the ropes of the ring. What the hell is this? The most